Thursday, 11 May 2017

Loving God, child of God

A loving
God?

While
many people find it easy to acknowledge some kind of deity; there is an idea prevalent
that to assume God loves us, each as individuals, is a belief that smacks too
much of wishful thinking; or else is just a plain denial of the nature of the
world.

But if a
loving God is understood to be a metaphysical assumption, then matters become
much clearer.

A
metaphysical assumption is not based on ‘evidence’ – so the personal or global balance
of good and evil, pleasure and pain, nice and nasty is irrelevant to the
question of whether God loves us: completely irrelevant. Until this is
understood, there will be hopeless confusion on this question.

The way I
think about it is that a child’s experience of the world – the extent to which the
child is wicked, or in pain or experiences nasty conditions; cannot be used to
infer how much that child’s parents love him.

Of
course, some people conflate that question of God’s love with an assumption
about God being omnipotent – and then they recognise the problem that if God is
both loving and omnipotent, then the world God made seems to be significantly
sub-optimal.

But in
reality, there is no reason to assume that God’s power and God’s love are both
necessarily true. Or that what these concepts mean is clear. In sum, lovingness
and omnipotence are two separate questions, and they must be considered separately.

The idea
that God loves each of us is indeed unusual in world religions – probably most religions
have had an unloving God or gods; so why do I believe it is true? What grounds
for such belief could there be?

The most
convincing grounds are a personal conviction that it is true.

However,
this leads on to the question of how we might know such a thing, even if it was
true; and I understand the answer to be that God is within me, as well as
outside of me. Because God is within me, I can have direct personal experience
of God and of his nature. I can know God, and know what he is like.

A Child
of God

It is metaphysically
important that we are children of God, because this is the reason why we have
been made such that we can understand reality.

Because I
am a son of God, I am partly divine; and this is why I can understand the truth
about things.

If I had
been a creature that was purely and only the product of natural selection,
there would be no reason at all why I should be able to discern the truth about
things – since I would be optimised only with respect to reproductive success,
not truth.

However,
since I am partly divine, and since God created this reality; I am potentially able
to know the truth about reality.

Destiny
and purpose

Furthermore;
my being a child of God is the reason for my destiny; in the sense that my
understanding is that God ‘had children’ in order that they may be able
(potentially) to grow-up to be fully divine, like God.

So,
another metaphysical assumption is that we begin as partly divine, and by
choice and experience may become more and more fully divine – and indeed
reality is set-up with the primary purpose that this be possible and
encouraged.

The world
is as-it-is not as an end in itself, but as a means to an end; the world is intended
to be an educational process, not a final result.

How is
this known by me? I think it is a further insight built upon those previously
mentioned. Given a conviction of the reality and lovingness of God, and the
fact of being able to understand God from within – knowledge of my personal
destiny – my purpose in this world - is also available, directly.

Is this
reasoning merely circular? Not merely – because it is based on assumptions that
such-and-such Just Is. These assumptions necessarily include that such and such
Just Is sufficient ‘evidence’ to confirm the earlier assumptions.

So
metaphysics is an incremental matter of discovering, making explicit, what we
actually are assuming – which may then lead to us changing these original basic
assumptions to make new basic assumption that we can endorse fully.

Having
established these basic assumptions about the nature of things (to our own satisfaction)
they may be built upon, and extrapolated – such inferences themselves being
retested (at various stages and phases) by the same basic mechanisms that
established the basic assumptions.

There is
a testing and feedback mechanism, as well as a process of extrapolative reasoning.
If, for whatever reason, we begin to feel uncertain, to doubt; then we can go
back and start again, as often as seems necessary.